When it comes to email marketing, hard and soft bounce rates are important terms you need to understand in determining the success of your email marketing campaign. If you are just getting started (or maybe you’ve been doing this for a little awhile) and are unsure of the difference between the two, then I encourage you to keep reading. Below I’ve outlined everything you need to know about bounce rate at a beginner level. Let’s dive in!
What is Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate is the amount of emails that generated a delivery error. However, there are two different types of bounce rates that you need to be aware of. One of them being more troublesome and permanent than the other.
Hard Bounce Rates
A hard bounce rate in email marketing is an email that simply could not be delivered, and will not be able to be delivered in the future. It could be for a of couple reasons – an incorrect (or invalid) email address, or because of a server issue that does not allow the email address to accept certain emails. There isn’t much you can do about these permanent bounces except remove the email address from your list. If you don’t, then you’re going to get a message every time you send out an email to your list, and likely a message for every single hard bounce.
Soft Bounce Rates
A soft bounce rate is when your email isn’t delivered, but the problem is temporary. The soft bounce is usually from an inbox that is full, a temporary server problem or the message being too big for the recipient’s inbox. Most of the time, soft bounces will be delivered on their own, because the mail server continues to try to send the email. But if you notice certain email addresses continue to soft bounce then it might be a good idea to just remove them from your list.
What Kind of Bounce Rate Should You Have?
Ideally, you want to have a bounce rate of two percent or lower. This means that if you have a thousand people on your email marketing list, only twenty at the very most, should bounce back to you. If you have a bounce rate that is any higher than that, then your bounce rate can get you into trouble as the mail service might flag you as spam. Which is the last place you want to be – in the deep, dark dungeon of email known as the spam folder. To ensure your emails don’t get marked as spam you need to be monitoring your bounce rate and taking measures to lower it when it starts to rise.
Ready to learn more? Check out this article on lowering your bounce rate: Easy ways to reduce your website’s bounce rate.
